Killer took bodies in boot on a family drive

By Dylan Welch Police Reporter

3 June 2008 — 10:00am

THE bodies of his murdered wife and stepdaughter were allegedly in the boot as Sanjay Mehta took family members for a drive to the Blue Mountains on a cold night last month.

After arriving at Echo Point, the family members went for a walk. Police allege Mehta then removed the bodies of 38-year-old Jyoti Mehta and her nine-year-old daughter, Ujalla Dinesh, and threw them over a 150-metre cliff.

When the family members returned to the car they found the 41-year-old Blacktown man smoking a cigarette.

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But on Sunday afternoon, the deceits which police say Mehta had been weaving for the past month - about the sudden and unexplained disappearance of his wife and stepchild - unravelled when two bushwalkers found a body lying at the base of Echo Point.

The long, straight black hair and purple top were a match to the missing persons report for Ms Mehta. Police discovered a second, smaller, body, which matched the description of Ujalla. Both were in a state of decomposition, police said.

By yesterday morning police had arrested and charged Mehta with the murders of his wife and stepchild. At the same time they seized a Toyota Camry, which they will allege was used to transport the bodies of the two to Echo Point.

Forensic examiners are yet to establish the cause of death but police believe the murders occurred in the family home.

Mehta originally told police his wife and stepdaughter had disappeared from the family home in Dunn Way, Blacktown, on the evening of May 5. Their passports and $100 were also gone, he said.

A missing persons investigation began but allegations of domestic abuse and the suspicions of Ms Mehta's younger sister, Poonam Sharma, led police in a different direction. Both Ms Sharma and a domestic violence worker told police of arguments and violence in the months before Ms Mehta's disappearance.

"The accused had been verbally abusive towards her and had made threats to kill both her and her daughter," said a police document tendered during a hearing at Blacktown Local Court yesterday.

Police alleged that between 8pm and 10pm on May 5, while Mehta was supposedly searching the streets of Blacktown, his mobile phone was detected about 75 kilometres away, in the Blue Mountains.

He later recanted and said he had travelled to the Blue Mountains that night, looking for his wife and Ujalla, the police document said.

Records also showed his mobile phone in the Blue Mountains the next day, May 6. Mehta has denied this.

The Indian national, employed as a parking technician, met his wife on the internet in July 2006. She moved to Australia in May the following year to marry him. Both had live-in children from previous marriages.

On May 26, three weeks after the disappearances, Mehta's former wife, the mother of his two children, returned from India and moved in. There is no suggestion she was involved in the disappearances.

Several weeks ago Ms Sharma tearfully pleaded for her sister to come home. "I don't know what happened and why she left. I don't know anything."

Mehta did not come up from his cell during yesterday's hearing at Blacktown Local Court. He will remain in custody until his next appearance, on July 21.